By S.L. Price

In Englewood, as in every mean pocket of urban America, this kind of story usually doesn't end well. Gangs and drug dealers roamed the blocks; gunshots popped day and night; Tragil saw one of Dwyane's kindergarten classmates running bags of white powder. Dwyane Sr. had by then moved across town into an apartment with his fiancée, Bessie McDaniel, and her three boys. He offered to take Dwyane, so one Friday in 1988 Tragil packed a weekend's worth of clothes and escorted her brother on a 15-minute bus ride, dropped him off, told him to call if anyone mistreated him and promised to pick him up. But she didn't. Jolinda can't remember a thing about the day her only son left home forever. For Dwyane it now stands as the last in a line of noble acts his sister performed to save him, but as a boy he called Tragil to say, "You lied to me. You said you'd come back and you didn't."

"At the time you feel relief that he's going to be in good hands," Tragil says. "Protected with Daddy. Later on it hit me that's my best friend. I missed him."

The following year Dwyane Sr. moved his son and the McDaniel clan to the somewhat safer environs of Robbins, in Chicago's south suburbs. Soon Tragil left her mother, then another daughter, Keisha, bolted, leaving only the oldest, Deanna, behind. "When I lost my kids? It seemed I lost the willingness to live," Jolinda says. "I just started surviving because I didn't see a way of getting them back." Three years later, in September 1992, she was arrested for the first time and pleaded guilty to possession of crack cocaine with the intent to sell. Dwyane Sr. took his 10-year-old son to see Jolinda while she was incarcerated at the Cook County jail. "I never went back again," Wade says. "I didn't want to see my mother locked up. I just couldn't." The following February she was sentenced to 14 months' probation.

But one week after her sentencing, Jolinda was arrested again and later convicted for trying to sell crack to an undercover police officer. "I'm trying to sell drugs to make ends meet to get money to do this and that; then it just came to the point I just sold drugs so I could keep my sick off," she says.

Jolinda spent 16 months in prison, then, on Oct. 29, 1995, was arrested for selling crack. Sentenced to four years in a state penitentiary, she served seven months before failing to report for a work-release program. In March 1997 a warrant was issued. "They called it an escape," she says. "I didn't go back: My addiction called me; I answered the call ... and there you go."

One evening last month Wade was sitting in Miami's American Airlines Arena after wrapping a photo shoot: D-Wade, Superstar, doing layups in a fine gray suit. The place was all but empty, just a half-dozen people checking Blackberries. "Seeing it," he said. "Seeing my mother on drugs was the darkest for me. People on drugs don't have the same comprehension;  you talk to them, and they fall asleep. That hurts. And you know it."

Wade started talking about his father, the discipline he instilled, when Tragil walked over. For a while Dwyane had sent her Mother's Day cards. Then last spring Tragil, 29, moved to the Miami area to help manage her brother's life; who better to do that? She bent down and kissed Dwyane four times on the cheek and neck. Dwyane Sr. was coming to town. "Call me about Daddy," she said, and walked off.

"That's my girl," Dwyane murmured, watching her figure grow smaller. "Hey," he shouted. "Don't be kissing me like that in front of everybody!" And her laughter echoed back even after she was gone.

It's easy, when taking stock of Dwyane Wade, to take him at face value. He speaks softly, smiles sweetly (yes, Tragil taught him that too) and trails a litany of praise from teammates and opponents that usually includes words like humble, quiet and polite. Did you know he married his high school sweetheart? That he tithes to his church? It's easy to mistake him for some unflappable choirboy, untainted by the modern star's usual cocktail of ego and insecurity. But then most people don't know that Wade got his first technical foul in high school for giving the opposing crowd the finger as he ran upcourt after blocking a shot; don't know that he got so insulted by all the attention paid LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony at the 2004 All-Star rookie game that he played "angry" the rest of that season ("I was like a third wheel," he says. "It was, like, Move out of the way, Dwyane, let Carmelo and LeBron take a picture. I felt slighted. I thought, I can be on these guys' level, so what am I going to do to get there?"); don't know that he wore his any more doubters? T-shirt so often after the Heat's championship run that his sister had to tell him to stop.